Jane Schneider at June Kelly

Jane Schneider found the wood she used for the evocative works in her recent exhibition, "Bare Bones," in the fields where she lives in upstate New York. She aggressively cuts and scrapes her raw materials, then paints their surfaces. In the resulting sculptures, simple but never simplistic, Schneider favors a direct esthetic, in which alterations of the original forms have been kept to a minimum. The shapes arc and curve into the air with a gestural affinity for the natural forces that shaped them, yet they also register the hand of the artist that brought them to completion. Schneider relies on nature to start the process, but her treatment of the wood is calculated, intended to bring out both its surface textures and internal forms.

In the tall sculpture titled Free Spirit (2002), which is more than 100 inches high, the artist has worked on two long legs of wood to create a roughly harplike shape, with one of the legs curling in at its base and rising to meet the other at a narrow angle at the top of the piece. Hollows in the wood have been painted a rustlike reddish brown. The effectiveness of the piece stems to some extent from the vulnerability and precariousness it conveys--this despite the apparent robustness of its construction. Another work, I Wish I May (2002), fans out at the top like a net, with the sturdy, curving wood giving it that same combination of strength and openness. Schneider has roughly colored the work in black, so that bits of lighter wood show through. Even with its odd shape, the work exquisitely expresses the innate beauty of the material.

In Odyssey (2003), Schneider created from her wood a kind of three-dimensional drawing that took up most of one wall in the gallery. Here, thin branches twisted this way and that, casting many shadows that stayed with the viewer. Odyssey was an intricate work, but not a fussy one: its overall feeling was poetic and meditative, like so much of Schneider's art. In an ongoing fashion, the artist presents her particular sense of lyrical form and a fine intuition about materials.

--Jonathan Goodman

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